("Open access as defined by the BOAI is a laudable goal in sync with the
aims of ARL. The BOAI states that those works that 'scholars give to the world
without expectation of payment' should be freely accessible online without cost
to the user. ARL is committed to working with scholarly publishers interested in
experimenting with new funding models to develop a realistic assessment of the
economic impact of open access. The Association believes an environment that
better reflects the values of the research and educational communities could
have the benefit of restoring to the academic community the control of its own
intellectual property while reducing costs. It would demonstrate to policy
makers and legislators the economic and intellectual vitality of a system that
more fully balances societal good with economic interests.")

The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the
Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) have launched the eJournals Delivery
Service (eJDS). Unlike other programs to delivery scientific ejournals to
developing countries, this one doesn't depend on local internet
connectivity. In regions where insufficient money or bandwidth mean that
scientists have email but not full internet connections, the eJDS will deliver
free copies of requested articles by email. eJDS allows participating
researchers to search the net and follow hyperlinks all by email, by clicking on
links in email attachments displayed in their browsers. Document delivery
depends on whether the ICTP has a subscription to the relevant journal.
Users can request a maximum of 3 articles per day, 12 per week, and 100 per
year, to avoid overburdening the system. If publishers want to put limits
on ICTP's freedom to copy and distribute their articles, ICTP will honor
them.

The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics is named for
the Pakistani Nobel laureate in physics (1979), located in Trieste, Italy,
supported by UNESCO and IAEA, and devoted to advancing research in developing
countries.

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) is the radical
extension to the DMCA that would require all computers to contain
government-approved, hardware-level security devices. It would prohibit
any attempt to bypass or remove these security devices, build a new computer
without one, or log into the internet without a "secured" (or crippled)
computer. It would punish violators with up to five years in prison and
fines over half a million dollars (see FOSN for 9/14/01, 10/5/01).

The content industry, led by Disney, loves the SSSCA because it will
provide hardware support for copy protection. The computer industry, led
by Intel, hates it because it would let lawmakers dictate how to build
computers. It would also hobble universal Turing machines in order to make
them safe for copyrighted entertainment, a preposterous trade-off. In
general, democrats side with the content industry and republicans side with the
computer industry.

On February 28, Senator Fritz Hollings held the first public hearing on the
SSSCA. Hollings drafted the bill but has not yet introduced it.
Early in the hearing he made his position perfectly clear. If Congress
doesn't pass the SSSCA, he argued, it will "essentially sanction the Internet as
a haven for thievery".

In his testimony, Disney CEO Michael Eisner argued that the computer
industry opposes the bill only because it profits from piracy.

Eisner also turned from the senators to engage fellow witness, Leslie
Vadasz, Executive VP of Intel. Eisner got Vadasz to admit that there is no
technology that can protect content once it is stolen and placed unprotected on
the internet. What's disturbing is that Eisner and Hollings apparently
believe this justifies the SSSCA.

* Postscript. Congressional deference to publishers at the expense of
readers, and the elevation of one legitimate interest over all legitimate
interests in conflict with it, was already extreme in the DMCA and has reached
truly psychotic proportions in the SSSCA. In the DMCA readers lost their
fair-use rights, purchasers lost their back-up rights, and libraries lost their
lending rights. With the SSSCA, computers will lose their universality and
become jukeboxes with built-in calculators. Congress has already upset the
constitutionally-mandated balance of interests within copyright law, and now
threatens to put entertainment ahead of every other use of the power of
computation.

The hearing makes pretty clear that Hollings is less interested in passing
the SSSCA than using it in order to terrorize the computer industry into
negotiating a private-sector solution with the content industry. But this
is not very reassuring. Congress likes to call these solutions "voluntary"
because they make legislation unnecessary. But of course any changes
brought about by the threat of the SSSCA are about as voluntary as money
transfers brought about by the threat of stabbing.

----------

The USA PATRIOT Act

The USA PATRIOT Act has been on the books since October 2001, but for some
reason there has been a recent spike of commentary on it, especially on its
implications for libraries and scholarship. Here's a sampling.

In the March issue of _American Libraries_, Karen Schneider calls the
Patriot Act the "last refuge of a scoundrel", quoting Samuel Johnson's
definition of patriotism. Actually, she has stronger words for it:
"treason pure and simple". Because the act authorizes the FBI to demand
any kind of records, including library borrowing records, Schneider recommends
that libraries identify their sensitive records and decide what to do with
them: "if you want sign-up sheets shredded every day, [then make sure
that] that is in fact what happens. When the court order comes, it is too
late to 'pull an Enron' and rush to the shredder". True patriots,
she argues, protect the constitution and the people they serve.

In the March 1 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Scott Carlson and Andrea
Foster report that colleges worry that complying the act will turn them into
spies on their own students and faculty. "Opening student computer files without
their permission. Reporting on the library books checked out by a graduate
student. Collecting data on who on campus is sending e-mail to whom.
To many college technology and library officials, these sound like invasions of
privacy that are antithetical to the traditions of academe. But these are the
sorts of actions that a new law may well permit or in some cases require."
Quoting Peter Swire, law professor at Ohio State University: "Universities
uphold the importance of free inquiry, and we don't want to chill that inquiry
by having researchers and students think that their every move is being tracked
by the government."

In a February 28 speech at Vanderbilt, Nadine Strossen, head of the ACLU,
said that the PATRIOT Act threatens the privacy and freedom of all Americans,
not just those suspected of committing terrorist acts. She accuses
Congress of being "being supine and not even taking the trouble to read this
behemoth law before they passed it".

In the February 15 _LLRX_, Mary Minow predicts "that there will be a great
many more surveillance orders, everywhere in the country, and in turn there will
be more requests for library records, including Internet use records."
It's also possible that the FBI will want to place its eavesdropping software,
Carnivore (aka DCS1000), on library servers.

In a couple of recent columns, Nat Hentoff reviews the damaging effects of
the Patriot Act on libraries and booksellers, and the privacy of their
patrons. From the third of these columns: "This, mind you, is part
of a law in the United States of America, not the People's Republic of
China."

* Postscript. Why all this commentary now? I'm not sure.
There hasn't been a notable incident to set it off. One possibility is
that while the legislation was adopted in the heat of passion following
September 11, cooler heads are starting to speak. Even if some were
willing to call it "treason pure and simple" the day it was adopted, editors are
now more likely to let the statement stand. Americans who find the act
justified are now more willing to admit that at least it is controversial and
that in America critics and dissenters may still speak their minds (John
Ashcroft is a notable exception).

* PPS. The USA PATRIOT Act is capitalized not from patriotism but
because it is an acronym --for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.

* PPPS. The constitution is harder to amend than legislation
precisely so that it will check episodes of legislative hysteria. Hope
lies a courageous plaintiff willing to go to court, and a few courageous federal
judges willing to live up to their oath.

----------

More on deleting scientific information from the web

Like the recent surge of PATRIOT criticism, there has been a recent spate
of stories on governments deleting information from the internet to keep it from
terrorists, even though this has been happening continuously since September
11. (See FOSN for 10/5/01, 10/12/01.)

(The article in this set most closely focusing on scientific
information. Quoting Michael Levi, who leads the effort to purge sensitive
information from the one million pages hosted by the Federation of American
Scientists: "We often err quite strongly on the side of caution."
The Energy Department ran a search across its online scientific documents, and
removed 9,000 containing keywords like "nuclear" or "chemical
storage". Staffers are looking through the 9,000 and putting back those
found to be harmless.)

* CalTech already maintains a number of OAI-compliant archives. It is
now willing to set up a new one for any research unit at the university willing
to sign the Author Permission Agreement and willing to agree that the archives
are archival and that no papers entered will be removed.

* Hussein Suleman and Edward Fox have launched the Open Digital Libraries
project (see FOSN for 12/19/01). For this purpose, an "open digital
library" is a network of OAI-compliant archives. The archives share
content and services through the OAI interface. Users can create and plug
in modules for additional power. The project already has modules for
harvesting, aggregating, and searching. This new power requires extending
the OAI standard slightly, but the extension is separable from the original
standard.

* The University of Michigan has launched the OAIster Project. The
project uses the OAI metadata harvesting protocol to reach content residing in
the deep or invisible internet and make it visible (readable, searchable).
It will also use Michigan's DLXS middleware to index the newly visible resources
to make them easier to find and retrieve. The project will apparently work
with any deep internet content except that which is protected by password.
OAIster is funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

* A Java Specification Request dated February 26, 2002, proposes a standard
API for content repositories to interact with applications that operate on their
content. (PS: This need isn't met by OAI, since many kinds of data
can't be well-captured by the Dublin Core at the heart of the OAI
standard. However, if work starts on a new standard, let's make sure that
it subsumes OAI.)

* The World Health Organization (WHO) has become an institutional member of
BioMed Central (BMC). This allows WHO researchers with accepted articles
to avoid the processing fees that BMC charges other authors in order to cover
the costs of dissemination and make access free for readers. Because WHO
is an important friend of FOS and producer of research, this is an important
endorsement of the BMC business model.

* Dialog, the large commercial database of scholarly journals, now offers
free searching of its unfree texts. Users running free searches get a hit
list of article titles, but not full citations (not authors, journal titles, or
dates). If they register a credit card with Dialog, they can purchase
access to full-text directly from the hit list. Dialog misleadingly calls
this service "open access". (PS: This may be Dialog's attempt to
catch up with Elsevier, which offers free searching of its unfree texts through
Scirus. But the Scirus hit list gives usefully complete bibliographic
citations --everything but page numbers.)

* The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the National Library of
Australia (NLA) are collaborating on several digital preservation
projects. One is to create an online digest of news on digital
preservation with an annual evaluation of the year's developments.

* Emerald has launched a new current awareness service. Users,
including non-subscribers, can search Emerald full-text journals and store the
searches. Emerald will notify users by email when newly published articles
contain any of the stored search-strings.

* Survivors of the Shoah is a collection of videotaped testimonies by over
50,000 eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. Presently the tapes can be viewed
only at selected museums in the U.S. and Israel, but eventually all the tapes
will be digitized and made available over the internet --not to everyone but to
"many more strategically chosen sites". A small amount of the content is
available now (select "Enhanced" from the front page). The collection was
produced by the Shoah Visual History Foundation, founded by Steven
Spielberg. The Foundation has been taping and digitizing the interviews
for eight years.

* Leiden University has created a directory of free online journals,
organized by discipline and alphabetically by title. Journal titles and
associated subject terms are searchable, and users can limit searches to
full-text journals or include those offering only TOCs and abstracts. A
separate page lists newly added journals. This isn't comprehensive directory of
FOS, but it's the closest thing I've seen so far.

* _Medical Approaches_ is not only a free online medical textbook.
It's a dynamic one that promises to remain authoritative and up to date.
(PS: This is such a natural way to take advantage of the internet.
Why is it so rare? One of the earliest and most important examples is the
_Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_. Are there other notable
examples?)

* The Text-e online seminar has moved on to the last text on its syllabus,
Umberto Eco's "Authors and Authority". It will be the subject of
discussion from February 28 to March 14. Here's how Eco encapsulates his
topic: "What is the role of the expert and of the intellectual at a time
when information is accessible to virtually everyone? Do intellectuals play the
role of a 'Web-filter'?"

* Two Finnish universities have released Fle3, an open-source learning
environment allowing groups of students or researchers to "carry out knowledge
building dialogues, theory building and debates by storing their thoughts into a
shared database". The source code and a file of tips for teachers are
available for downloading at the site.

* The File Room is an archive of worldwide censorship, organized by date,
location, medium, and grounds for censorship. For each incident it gives a
concise report. The collection covers censorship from the Ancient Greeks
to the present.

* If you're planning to give a public talk about how copyright law is
harming libraries and scholarship, you'll appreciate Russell McOrmand's notes on
the questions you're likely to face and suggestions on how to answer. For
example, are you a socialist? McOrmand has also posted the slides he uses
in his public talks.

* The College Art Association (CAA) would like to file an amicus brief
supporting Eric Eldred's Supreme Court case against the Bono Copyright Extension
Act (FOSN for 4/24/01, 2/25/02). To prepare its brief, the CAA requests
the help of teachers, scholars, and curators. You needn't have legal
expertise. If you can show that extending copyrights for an additional 20
years, and the corresponding shrinkage of the public domain, will harm your
work, your profession, or those you serve, the CAA would like to hear from
you. The deadline is March 28.

* The NSF is soliciting applications for "projects that demonstrate how
modern information and communications technologies can fundamentally change the
way in which topical material is represented and delivered to diverse
communities of users." Applicants should send an optional letter of intent
by April 27 and their full application by May 27.

* In the March 8 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Deanna Marcum and Anne
Kenney argue that one solution to the preservation of books printed on acidic
paper is to digitize rather than microfilm them. After digitization, the
works could be made accessible "universally" (I assume this means free of
charge) on the web. Three problems face this strategy: first, find
good ways to keep the digital copies readable over the long term; second,
coordinate libraries so that they don't duplicate labor that only has to be
performed once; and third, find external funds to cover their costs.

* In the March 4 _Los Angeles Times_, Jonathan Tasini, the plaintiff in the
landmark Supreme Court on digital rights, has an op-ed piece supporting Eric
Eldred's suit to overturn the Bono Copyright Extension Act. "Rather than
carry the water for an industry bent on impoverishing us in this lifetime and
reaping the benefits long after we are gone, creators should embrace the
principle that human knowledge advances when information is shared, that
cultural expression belongs to the public and that the intellectual wealth of a
nation, in the form of ideas and information, cannot --and should not-- be
locked up as the property of a few."

* In the March/April of _CLIR Issues_, Daniel Greenstein argues that
digital libraries should be tested by their support for scholarship. One
way for research libraries to provide this support is to create free online
archives and other channels for presenting the results of research. "One
immediate question is whether digital libraries are adequately connected to
their scholarly communities to sustain these new and laudable objectives."
(Greenstein, who was formerly the Director of the Digital Library Federation,
was recently appointed the Executive Director of the California Digital
Library.)

* In the same issue of _CLIR Issues_, Deanna Marcum describes the January
31 meeting of the CLIR and AAP Working Group created to address issues common to
libraries and publishers (see FOSN for 1/16/02). Librarians and publishers
tend to have conflicting interests --for example, open access v. restricted
access. But at the meeting they outlined nine issues on which they should
discuss the possibility of collaboration and joint action. One was digital
archiving. Another was economic models for maintaining digital
archives.

* In the February 28 _Guardian_, Stuart Millar reports on the launch of the
Digital Preservation Coalition in a ceremony at the House of Commons. One
of his anecdotes serves nicely as a parable to explain the need for the DPC and
similar initiatives: "To mark the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book
in 1986, the BBC launched an ambitious project to capture information on the
modern UK, storing contributions from researchers and thousands of
schoolchildren on two hi-tech 12in laser discs. The original Domesday Book can
still be read, but the information on the 17-year-old discs is now almost
unreadable because the technology to access them is obsolete."

* In the February 28 _Business Week_, Heather Green reports that copyright
law is hindering Brewster Kahle's plan to create a free archive of the entire
internet. Quoting Lawrence Lessig: "[Kahle] has the technology, he
has the money, and he has the business plan. All he needs is the
permission of the lawyers, and he won't get it."

* On February 26, DigiCULT put online its recommendations on how European
cultural heritage institutions can "unlock the value of their collections" by
moving online. "The conversion of all sorts of cultural contents into bits
and bytes opens up a completely new dimension of reaching traditional and new
audiences by providing access to cultural heritage resources in ways
unimaginable a decade ago."

* In a February 26 story in _Wired News_, Brad King describes two new WIPO
treaties to take effect over the coming months. They change the worldwide
copyright rules for software, movies, and music. Most of King's article is
on the US DMCA, which was implemented in order to satisfy the terms of an
earlier WIPO treaty, but which went well beyond the requirements of the
treaty.

* In the February 15 _CNet_, Eliot Van Buskirk describes Lawrence Lessig's
plan for the Creative Commons. He focuses on music rather than other
digital content, but still gives more detail relevant to FOS than we got from
the first wave of stories on the Creative Commons.

* The February issue of _CLIRinghouse_ contains an anonymous exploring ways
to help students find useful digital scholarship. The problem is that four
out of five college freshmen turn to mainstream search engines when they have to
find scholarship or information for an assignment. These search engines
usually miss the most useful resources in the invisible web, on which colleges
spend so much money in licensing fees and on which scholars spend so much time
in peer review. The Mellon Foundation is funding some experiments whose
general approach is to make database content more visible rather than to train
freshmen to look beyond Google. Some of the experiments have the
encouragement and assistance of the Digital Library Federation.

* In a February paper posted to the _National Library of Australia_, David
Toll describes Australia's ambitious plan to create seamless online access to
the nation's "documentary information". For some content access would be
free, while for other content it would be priced but affordable.

* In the January/February issue of _The American Spectator_, Lawrence
Lessig excerpts his new book, _The Future of Ideas_. I recommend the book
strongly, but if you don't have time for it, or if you need a test run, then I
recommend these excerpts.

* The January/February issue of _eCulture_ is now available. It
contains short reports on many of the EU's IST digital programs, and longer
stories on digitization cooperation in Europe, the DigiCULT study (see above at
February 26). Separate stories don't have separate URLs.

* France wants to try the former CEO of Yahoo for condoning war crimes by
allowing the auction of Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo. For background on the
France-Yahoo conflict, and an explanation of why it's relevant to FOS, see FOSN
for 11/9/01, 11/16/01.